[project1dev] Re: Animation LODing

From: Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx>

To: project1dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 22:29:56 -0700

man im jealous....
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:27 PM, <mattthefiend@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Mine is prolly good for high standard and works for multi core testing
>
> 2x 256 mb hd 4550 radeon cards
> Athlon 2.8ghz dual core
> 4 gb memory w/ 2gb reserve for 64bit
> And an amazing motherboard
>
> Its my pride and joy! :)
>
> Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
>
> ------------------------------
> *From*: Alan Wolfe
> *Date*: Thu, 7 May 2009 22:20:06 -0700
>
> *To*: <project1dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> *Subject*: [project1dev] Re: Animation LODing
> Kent just got an upgrade but if not for that i'd say he had you beat every
> day of the week (and twice on sunday)
>
> but lol, what's your specs? You may be right we could use your machine as
> the min specs maybe...
>
> and btw my comp is kinda old, i think like 2 years maybe more... it's a P4
> 2.6GHZ w/ 1GB RAM so shrug.
>
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Nick Klotz <roracsenshi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> I'm pretty sure my computer will end up becoming the low standard. If it
>> runs on this pos it'll run on dos.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> Hey thats an idea Matt...
>>>
>>> if animation takes a lot of CPU time we could have an animation quality
>>> setting which would set the max instances of the animations higher or lower.
>>>
>>> Neat idea (:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:06 PM, <mattthefiend@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Sounds awesome to me! Its nice to be able to scale down graphics as well
>>>> for slower machines.
>>>>
>>>> Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------
>>>> *From*: Alan Wolfe
>>>> *Date*: Thu, 7 May 2009 21:59:16 -0700
>>>> *To*: <project1dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>>> *Subject*: [project1dev] Re: Animation LODing
>>>> Oh and we can do this in our game too if we need to as a preformance
>>>> optomization later on (:
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 9:41 PM, Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Ok so for those of you that don't know what LOD is, it stands for
>>>>> "Level of detail" and in essence means that when things are farther away,
>>>>> or
>>>>> less noticeable in some way, that you use less detail cause nobody
>>>>> notices,
>>>>> and that saves you processing power and memory.
>>>>>
>>>>> For example, objects that are farther away (models, mountains, etc) use
>>>>> less polygons when they are far away since you can't tell the difference
>>>>> at
>>>>> a great distance anyways.
>>>>>
>>>>> It makes everything way nicer.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Anyhow...So animating models is expensive (takes a lot of CPU power).
>>>>>
>>>>> Today i learned something really bad ass, an animation LODing
>>>>> technique.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> So what the deal is, is you declare up front how many of a specific
>>>>> type of animation are allowed to run at once.
>>>>>
>>>>> So like... if you have 10 people all walking around using the same
>>>>> animation, normally you'd have to pay the cost of processing that same
>>>>> animation 10 times.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> The LOD technique is to say "only allow 3 maximum instances of that
>>>>> animation to happen at once".
>>>>>
>>>>> So what that does is only process 3 animations but have multiple people
>>>>> use the same processed animation data.
>>>>>
>>>>> If you set it to only 1 maximum instance, everyone would animate and
>>>>> walk in unison which is really crappy, and if you do too high a number
>>>>> maximum instances, too many people are animating and it eats up a lot of
>>>>> CPU.
>>>>>
>>>>> So you basically find the balance and say "well its hard to tell that
>>>>> they are sharing animations if you do 3 max" and then you have your magic
>>>>> number, and the game runs faster.
>>>>>
>>>>> It's kind of cool... just wanted to share it with everyone...
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>